pinkfloydpsw's Blog

There is to be found an abundance of proficiency in the practice of carrying out tasks such as potting a snooker ball. There is no shortage of players who can do this, and do it very well. What then is there to separate any of these persons, why then are there so few professionals that can consistently make their living at the game? My theory is that the difference is exterior to the ability, what makes greatness is other than the skill to play the game well. If we consider a comparison between two players of note, one that has had much success and other that has had little, I will use Stephen Hendry and Willie Thorne. Hendry is arguably, and objectively, the greatest player of the game in that he has had the greatest number of major successes. Thorne is a snooker expert, knowledgeable as a snooker theorist on all facets of cueing, break building and tactical play but was not a prolific winner of tournaments. What may appear to separate these two is performance ability, I will attempt to argue otherwise. If we contend, and it is likely, that each player is equally as proficient in playing the game in a practice situation and that each player is also a student of the game, in that they have learned from that practice experience to be able to predict outcomes sufficiently enough to be called “expert”, then we cannot easily say that what allows them to be different is something snooker related. As an example, we might differentiate between armies by their size, training, tactics or available weaponry, or we may differentiate in a running race using the physicality of the sportsmen, we cannot do this in snooker to the same degree. What I mean is that in a practice situation it is likely that any professional snooker player can recreate the brilliance of the great players whereas it is unlikely that any sprinter can break bolt’s world record. So the average pro snooker player can show consistently the sort of ability that could win matches, ability is therefore not the issue. What is the issue then, can we identify it?

Nerve, the control of faculty in situation is the key, this control would, I would speculate, permeate through other parts of the person in question’s life. It is likely that of our two protagonists that Hendry is the more calm and collected character in what we might call real life. I don’t personally know these guys but I think that it’s a fair assumption that Hendry could take this trait, rather than a skill, into other areas and use it to fuel success. Like Muhammed Ali once said, when asked what he would have been if he hadn’t been the greatest boxer in the world, “I would have been the greatest bin man in the world”. So greatness may not be a learned skill in itself but it will require learned skills for realisation? Dan Gilbert wrote an article called The Weight at the Plate about a baseball player who equalled the home run record but then couldn’t break it, he finally did though and he went on to easily extend it. What was happening to this guy? According to Gilbert it was the individual’s awareness of the significance to others, baseball fans, of breaking the record that temporarily stayed his ability to do something that he had time and again found relatively easy, once that expectation was removed the pressure that had been debilitating him lifted and he could get back to doing what he did well. Nothing physical or to do with technique had happened here, his greatness was affected by his perspective. This leads us nicely into a second postulate, one of awareness.

Is it easier to perform an act if you do not give it significance? It would seem so, in the film Shooter, the sniper trains another combatant in shooting well. He says “slow is smooth and smooth is fast”, now that doesn’t appear to be intuitive. It works though, if you try to be quick you will be slow, if you try to be smooth you will be fast. Having been in the army and having been a marksman and a very good shot I can say that the effort to make the shot is unimportant to the quality of it. Better to relax and find the shot naturally than to try to make it by effort. So if we are talking snooker again and our pals Hendry and Thorne, can we say that even though Hendry desired to win greatly he was better able to achieve that goal by not focusing on it. I think this is the case, he focussed on making breaks in each frame, to try and pot all balls from start to finish. This is not a secondary preference it is the first preference, the effect of which was that it made the winning of the match realisable. Thorne on the other hand focussed on winning the match and that’s why he didn’t achieve that goal as much.

So the key to greatness is then an ability that does not relate directly to the sport but will be useful to it, a dedication to the functional aspects of the sport i.e practice and the ability to not focus on the outcome of winning but to supplant a more immediately achievable goal in its place that’s nature can contribute to the goal but does not disable it if it fails.

Paul Simon Wilson